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After 47 years as little more than a local ghost story, Kentucky State Police announced that an unidentified murdered woman discovered near Harlan is Sonja Kaye Blair-Adams.
Investigators in New Hampshire are promising that new information will soon be available in one of the nation’s strangest so-called Jane Doe cases. Hunters first found the remains of a woman and a girl stuffed in a barrel in Allenstown, New Hampshire, 30 years ago. It took another 15 years for authorities to discover that there was another barrel just 100 yards away containing the remains of two more young girls.
There are at least 10,000 unidentified bodies in morgues and cemeteries across the country. Bodies may remain unidentified for far too long because agencies are not required to share case information about missing people and Jane and John Does.
We created a new Web tool – using information from the NamUs database – in order to make it easier to match missing and unidentified people . Senior data editor Jennifer LaFleur explains how it works.